River-based and egocentric spatial orientation in Yine

Abstract

AbstractIn linguistic studies on spatial reference frames, South American languages are still underrepresented. This explorative study offers a qualitative discussion of strategies that were found to encode location and orientation of objects in Yine, an Amazonian language of Peru. Geocentric and egocentric frames were attested as equally dominant strategies to provide spatial information in a picture-matching task, the results of which are split by age group of speakers. Senior Yine speakers mainly used river-oriented geocentric and intrinsic frames, whereas young adult speakers relied on egocentric and intrinsic frames exclusively. Left/right/behind relators were predominantly interpreted in allocentric-intrinsic frames by speakers of both groups but egocentric-extrinsic frames also arose in spatial descriptions elicited from younger speakers.